9 Ways to Make Software Drums Sound Real

Ah yes, fake drums. When it comes to programming drums, we’ve got some great tutorials on how to make them feel more human, and how to build a sampler drumkit from scratch. But what about if some seriously fake drums come to you for mixing? 

Perhaps they arrive with a directive attached: please make these drums sound as real as possible. What do you do?

In my experience, there’s no panacea. A lot of little moves add up to sampled drums that look and feel real. We’ll cover these moves below so you’ve got a better shot at achieving a more lifelike drum sound in the mix.

1. Avoid heaps of EQ and compression on the drum tracks themselves

Most drum-sampling engines offer well-balanced, well-EQd, and well-compressed samples right out of the gate. Many products advertise a mix-ready sound, having utilized console preamps, outboard EQ, and compression on the way in.

The sound is there. In other words, all that’s missing is the human element. This should fall to the producer. But sometimes your producer has skipped the human element entirely, providing you with lifeless, stuck-to-the-grid stems. Making matters worse, they can also arrive overly-processed from the artist or producer.

As the mixer, you’re in an unenviable position here. You must make these drums—drums not recorded with your song in mind—fit the tune. Yet EQ and compression have been salting and peppering the drums long before they got to you, so more of the same won’t help. If you try to compress and EQ each drum, you may find it sounds worse more often than it sounds better.

What’s an enterprising mixer to do?

2. Re-edit parts to improve the groove

We all want to make the drums sound more real. But they’ll never sound real if they don’t feel reel. A sampled drum in isolation is exactly the same as a human drum hit in isolation: both are samples under the microscope.

No, the programming is where it falls apart. You’ll notice problems when everything is quantized to an inhuman degree, or when the drums sound as though they're played with Vishnu’s many limbs. So see if the parts need editing before they need mixing.

Pay attention to the song. Note the groove of the bass, the feel of the guitar, and every other aspect of the arrangement. Keep a close watch on drum fills. Here drummers proudly display their humanity—many speed up in their fills, relaxing back into the tempo during the next measure.

Edit your sampled drums to fit the instruments at hand, keeping what we’ve just discussed in mind. If you’re presented with more than one drum stem (kick, snare, hi-hat, etc). make sure you group them. Be careful to edit all of them together so that no one region is left behind.

If you’re given any sort of overhead or cymbal track, take great care with your splicing. You cannot edit them in a way that disrupts their natural decay.

Here’s a drum part programmed in Superior Drummer 3, played to a bass part that pulls ahead of the beat. It’s been quantized at 43% before I bounced the track to audio. Note how bad it feels:

So let’s edit for an improved groove, and see if we get something that feels a bit more real: